Suchergebnisse

Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the "inclusive view" of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy "the open view of toleration is with no constraints" is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories are intolerant and fail to live up to democratic obligations to provide justifications to all members of the deliberative community. In a deliberative democracy, accommodations to religious minorities must be based on transformations in the current reflective equilibrium among the norms that make up the complex democratic ideal. This is not merely a conceptual enterprise of commensuration, since the need for any such transformation in standards of justification is due to changes in the nature of the polity itself, changes that in turn modify its regime of toleration.

Baird reviews 'On Toleration' by Michael Walzer.

A review essay on a book by Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflit: Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines umstrittenen Begriffs ([Tolerance in Conflict: History, Content and Present of a Disputed Concept] Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).

Toleration as Recognition, Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. viii, 242In Toleration as Recognition Anna Elisabetta Galeotti offers
up a sympathetic critique of liberal toleration and suggests a
modification to the theory that she believes necessary in order to bring
cultural minorities into the public sphere as equal citizens. This
carefully argued book marks a timely contribution to the debate over group
rights and multiculturalism.

Within the context of the debate about religious symbolism in secular state schools stemming from the 1989 incident involving the expulsion of 3 schoolgirls in France for wearing the traditional Muslim headscarf, this debate is considered here as a form of philosophical engagement with more general principles of toleration, neutrality, & citizenship. Focus is on a central concept invoked in the headscarves debate -- laicite -- best translated as "secularism." The origins of the concept are traced to the French Revolution, describing how it became the official doctrine of the Third Republic (1870-1940) & guided the development of secular state primary education in the 1880s & the subsequent disestablishment of the Catholic Church. Three somewhat different meanings of laicite are identified -- neutrality, autonomy, & community -- & the use of each across French history is demonstrated. It is argued that the headscarves debate became so excessively problematic because it challenged all three of these meanings of laicite simultaneously. K. Hyatt Stewart